Sun Microsystems chief researcher John Gage will leave the company and join venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Gage, who joined Sun in 1982, will focus on "green" investments. Meanwhile, Sun wilts. After corporate clients slowed their tech infrastructure investments, Sun reported second quarter losses and Gage is…
Speaking to young graduates, including eight new Amazon.com hires, at Carnegie Mellon University's commencement ceremonies on Sunday, Jeff Bezos admitted that he's a nerd who does "a mean interpretation of Captain Picard," but is not a sexless monk. That classification was suggested by Amazon board member John Doerr…
After reading our take on VC blogger Fred Wilson's advice that entrepreneurs need to learn how to "ask for the order," Persai cofounder Ted Dziuba commented: "Methinks Fred Wilson doth blog too much." We disagree, if only because Wilson is such a fruitful source. But at a venture capital conference in San Francisco…
The Castilleja School, a posh private prep school for girls in Palo Alto with an annual tuition of $29,305, received a $1 million from the Benificus foundation, which lists John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins as president and his wife, Ann Howland Doerr, as vice president and secretary. The gift was part of the school's…
John Doerr has closed a half-billion dollars in capital for the new Kleiner Perkins cleantech growth fund, with buddy Al Gore kicking in some dough from his Generation Investment deal. [CNet] (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)
Former U.S. vice president Al Gore will chair a new $683 million Climate Solutions Fund from Generation Investment Management. The money will be used to seed public and private companies in long-term investments in carbon markets, renewable energy and cleaner fossil fuel use. Generation includes Gore's BFF John…
John Doerr and Al Gore have been taking their pitch for a new $400 million environment-friendly venture fund to prospective limited partners, and have already hired a veteran investment manager from Goldman Sachs to run it. This fund, which would invest in late-stage — that is, larger — clean energy and carbon…
Norwegian electronic car manufacturer Think Global will ship 50,000 units to American customers, reports Alarm Clock. How much will this cleantech toy with a top speed of 65 mph set you back? $30,000. But hey, think of all the money you won't be spending on gas when you plug the car into our coal-fired power grid.…
The New York Times reported earlier today that local electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors is suing Fisker Automotive, alleging breach of contract by a designer who took his trade secrets to the upstart rival. Earth2Tech pointed out that the two startup automakers are the pet projects of rival VCs, including Draper…
Between 1970 and 2005, U.S. venture-backed companies created 10 million jobs and produced almost 17 percent of the country's GNP, and according to BusinessWeek editor Spencer Ante, one man is largely responsible for all of that. He is former Harvard Business School professor and "founder of the modern VC industry"…
Ordinarily, this would be good news: Vinod Khosla, the former Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist, and his wife Neeru Khosla, have donated $500,000 to Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, the Wikimedia Foundation. But founder Jimmy Wales's dalliances with other VCs — chiefly Roger McNamee and Marc Bodnick of Elevation…
At Apple's iPhone SDK announcement today, Steve Jobs had "one more thing..." to reveal. Venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins came onstage to announce a $100,000,000 "iFund" to help "young developers with funding." This is a huge amount of money for developers, but no details on how it will be invested or…
BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante has another interview outtake with former Hewlett-Packard board member and Kleiner Perkins cofounder Tom Perkins. In it, Perkins explains how he helped turn around HP. Here's the 100-word version of the harrowing tale of board committees, patent policies and microprocessors oh my!
We already knew that David Cheriton, the Stanford professor who introduced Larry Page and Sergey Brin to the venture capitalists at Kleiner Perkins and who subsequently became a billionaire, was cheap. But we didn't fully realize the depths of his frugality. A Forbes piece on penny-pinching billionaires reveals that…
When Kleiner Perkins announced former Vice President Al Gore would join the VC firm as a partner, there was a sweet little tidbit: Gore would be donating all of his VC salary to some envirohippie charity. But, as PE Week points out, VCs don't make most of their money off their salaries, making their fortunes instead…
Does Al Gore's accountant choose the site of his magazine photo shoots? As we noted, Gore should be making much more use of his San Francisco condo now that he's a partner at Kleiner Perkins. But the Fortune article which broke the news of his hire lensed him in his Nashville, Tennessee home. Granted, I'm sure the…
Anyone remember "Gore and Doerr"? That was Silicon Valley's dream presidential ticket in the late '90s, long before the Supreme Court nixed Al Gore's presidential career and John Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins VC, torpedoed his own golden reputation by missing out on all the hot Internet companies of this millennium.…
Kleiner Perkins partner Randy Komisar freaked you out a little when he said the firm was done with Web 2.0, didn't he? ""We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies," he told Silicon Valley Watcher. Well, don't worry. Kleiner Perkins, which backed Amazon.com, Google, AOL, and, um, Friendster, remains…
"... Kleiner Perkins has halted investments in Web 2.0. This would mean a lot more to me if I knew exactly what Web 2.0 was — I've been reading about it for years now, have co-organized two conferences on it, and I still don't know." — Canadian lawyer Rob Hyndman, who hasn't read Valleywag's Web 2.0 crib sheet. [Rob…
Can you believe that last week's Web 2.0 Summit was the fourth such conference? Its humble beginnings were barely in evidence, as venture capitalists, corporate biz-dev types, and M&A scouts seemed to outnumber the startup founders they were trying to hunt down. Friday afternoon was a return to the old school,…
